Never Eat Alone Read online

  The more specific you are about what you want to do, the easier it becomes to develop a strategy to accomplish it. Part of that strategy, of course, is establishing relationships with the people in your universe who can help you get where you're going.

  Every successful person I've met shared, in varying degrees, a zeal for goal setting. Successful athletes, CEOs, charismatic leaders, rainmaking salespeople, and accomplished managers all know what they want in life, and they go after it.

  As my dad used to say, no one becomes an astronaut by accident. Luck has little to do with achievement, as a study cited in Success magazine makes clear. In the study, researchers asked Yale's class of 1953 a number of questions. Three had to do with goals:

  Have you set goals?

  Have you written them down?

  Do you have a plan to accomplish them?

  It turned out that only 3 percent of the Yale class had written down their goals, with a plan of action to achieve them. Thirteen percent had goals but had not written them down. Fully 84 percent had no specific goals at all, other than to "enjoy themselves." In 1973, when the same class was resurveyed, the differences between the goal setters and everyone else were stunning. The 13 percent who had goals that were not in writing were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent of students who had no goals at all. But most surprising of all, the 3 percent who had written their goals down were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent of graduates combined!

  My own focus on goal setting started early. As a Yale undergrad, I thought I wanted to become a politician, a future governor of Pennsylvania. (I really was that specific, and that naive.) But I learned that the more concrete my goal, the more I could accomplish toward it. In my sophomore year, I became chairman of Yale's political union, where so many alumni had cut their teeth before going on to careers in politics. When I became interested in joining a fraternity, I didn't simply join the first organization available to me. I researched which fraternity had the most active politicians as alumni. Sigma Chi had a rich tradition and an alumni roster of impressive leaders. But the fraternity wasn't chartered at Yale at that time. So we founded a chapter.

  Eventually I ran for New Haven City Council. I lost, but in the process met everyone from William F. Buckley and Governor of Pennsylvania Dick Thornburg to the president of Yale, Bart Giamatti. I made regular visits to see Bart up until he died; he was a virtual oracle of advice and contacts for me. Even then, I recognized how something as simple as a clearly defined goal distinguished me from all those who simply floated through school waiting for things to happen. Later, I would apply this insight with even more vigor.

  At Deloitte & Touche, for example, it was one of the ways I differentiated myself from the other postgrad consultants. I knew I needed a focus, a direction that I could pour my energies into. An article by Michael Hammer that I read in business school gave me that focus. Coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, Hammer's ideas were taking the business world by storm and were on the verge of creating a new segment for consulting services.

  Here was a chance to become an expert on a relatively new body of knowledge and research that was quickly becoming in hot demand. I read all the case studies and attended every conference or lecture I could. Wherever Michael Hammer was, there was I. Over time, he thankfully saw me less as a stalker and more as a pupil and friend. My access to Michael Hammer, and my growing knowledge in the field, helped me broker a much stronger relationship between my company and one of the business world's most influential and respected thinkers. Publicity and profits followed for Deloitte as they became a company at the forefront of the reengineering movement. And with that success, my career, which had once been on shaky ground, began to soar.

  Countless books have been written about goal setting over the last few decades. Yes, it really is that important. Over the years, I've refined my own goal-setting process into three steps. But the key is to make setting goals a habit. If you do that, goal setting becomes a part of your life. If you don't, it withers and dies.

  Step One: Find Your Passion

  The best definition of a "goal" I've ever heard came from an extraordinarily successful saleswoman I met at a conference who told me, "A goal is a dream with a deadline." That marvelous definition drives home a very important point. Before you start writing down your goals, you'd better know what your dream is. Otherwise, you might find yourself headed for a destination you never wanted to get to in the first place.

  Studies indicate that well over 50 percent of Americans are unhappy at work. Many of these people are doing well, but they are doing well at something they don't enjoy. How we got ourselves into such a situation isn't difficult to understand. People get overwhelmed by the decisions they have to make about their jobs, their families, their businesses, their futures. There are too many choices, it seems. We end up shifting our focus to talents we don't have and careers that don't quite fit. Many of us respond by simply falling into whatever comes down the pike without ever asking ourselves some very important questions.

  Have you ever sat down and thought seriously about what you truly love? What you're good at? What you want to accomplish in life? What are the obstacles that are stopping you? Most people don't. They accept what they "should" be doing, rather than take the time to figure out what they want to be doing.

  We all have our own loves, insecurities, strengths, weaknesses, and unique capabilities. And we have to take those into account in figuring out where our talents and desires intersect. That intersection is what I call your "blue flame"—where passion and ability come together. When that blue flame is ignited within a person, it is a powerful force in getting you where you want to go.

  I think of the blue flame as a convergence of mission and passion founded on a realistic self-assessment of your abilities. It helps determine your life's purpose, from taking care of the elderly to becoming a mother, from being a top engineer to becoming a writer or a musician. I believe everyone has a distinct mission inside of him or her, one that has the capacity to inspire.

  Joseph Campbell, who coined the phrase "follow your bliss" in the early 1900s, was a graduate student at Columbia University. His blue flame, he decided, was the study of Greek mythology. When he was told there was no such major, he devised his own plan.

  After graduation, he moved into a cabin in Woodstock, New York, where he did nothing but read from nine in the morning until six or seven each night for five years. There isn't exactly a career track for lovers of Greek myth. Campbell emerged from the woods a very, very knowledgeable man, but he still had no clue what to do with his life. He persisted in following his love of mythology anyway.

  The people who met him during this time were astonished by his wisdom and passion. Eventually, he was invited to speak at Sarah Lawrence College. One lecture led to another, until finally, when Campbell looked up one day twenty-eight years later, he was a famous author and professor of mythology, doing what he loved, at the same school that had given him his first break. "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living."

  So how do you figure out your bliss?

  Campbell believed that deep within each person, there's an intuitive knowledge of what she or he wants most in life. We only have to look for it.

  Well, I agree with Dr. Campbell. All good decisions, I'm convinced, come from good information. Deciding on your passion, your bliss, your blue flame is no different. There are two aspects to getting good information. One part comes from within you; the other part comes from those around you.

  1. Look inside

  There are many ways to conduct a self-assessment of your goals and dreams. Some people pray. Others meditate or read. Some exercise. A few seek long periods of solitude.

  The important thing when conducting an internal review is to do without the constraints, without the doubts, fears, and expectations
of what you "should" be doing. You have to be able to set aside the obstacles of time, money, and obligation.

  When I'm in the right frame of mind, I start to create a list of dreams and goals. Some are preposterous; others are overly pragmatic. I don't attempt to censure or edit the nature of the list—I put anything and everything down. Next to that first list, I write down in a second column all the things that bring me joy and pleasure: the achievements, people, and things that move me. The clues can be found in the hobbies you pursue and the magazines, movies, and books you enjoy. Which activities excite you the most, where you don't even notice the hours that pass?

  When I'm done, I start to connect these two lists, looking for intersections, that sense of direction or purpose. It's a simple exercise, but the results can be profound.

  2. Look outside

  Next, ask the people who know you best what they think your greatest strengths and weaknesses are. Ask them what they admire about you and what areas you may need help in.

  Before long, you'll find that the information you're getting from your own review and the input you receive from others will lead you to some very concrete conclusions about what your mission or direction should be.

  Some of the business world's toughest CEOs and entrepreneurs are big believers in this notion of the blue flame—although they probably don't call it that.

  James Champy, celebrated consultant and coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, claims that success is first and foremost a matter of our dreams. In his book The Arc of Ambition, Champy found that the abilities of successful leaders like Ted Turner, Michael Dell, and Jack Welch are less important than the fact that each shares a clearly defined mission that drives him in all that he does.

  When Champy asked Michael Dell where he found the ambition to build Dell computers, the CEO started to talk about business cycles and technology. Then he stopped.

  "You know where I think the dream really came from?" he said. He described driving to school through the suburbs of Houston and ogling the office buildings with their great flagpoles. Dell wanted a flagpole. He wanted that kind of presence. To him, it was a symbol of success, and it drove him to envision starting up his own company before he could legally order a drink. Today, he has three flagpoles. I've spoken to Michael a number of times about his strategy at Dell, and it's amazing how each and every time this dream comes through clearly.

  Human ambitions are like Japanese carp; they grow proportional to the size of their environment. Our achievements grow according to the size of our dreams and the degree to which we are in touch with our mission.

  Coming up with goals, updating them, and monitoring our progress in achieving them is less important, I believe, than the process of emotionally deciding what it is you want to do.

  Does that mean a hopeless dreamer could have run GE as well as Neutron Jack? Of course not. The transformation of a dream into reality requires hard work and discipline.

  "Welch might resent the fact that I say, 'Jack, you're a dreamer,'" says Champy. "But the truth is he's a disciplined dreamer. He has the ability and sensibility that allows him to walk into various industries and see where the opportunities are."

  Disciplined dreamers all have one thing in common: a mission. The mission is often risky, unconventional, and most likely tough as hell to achieve. But it is possible. The kind of discipline that turns a dream into a mission, and a mission into a reality, really just comes down to a process of setting goals.

  Step Two: Putting Goals to Paper

  Turning a mission into a reality does not "just happen." It is built like any work of art or commerce, from the ground up. First, it must be imagined. Then, one needs to gather the skills, tools, and materials needed. It takes time. It requires thought, determination, persistence, and faith.

  The tool I use is something I call the Networking Action Plan. The Plan is separated into three distinct parts: The first part is devoted to the development of the goals that will help you fulfill your mission. The second part is devoted to connecting those goals to the people, places, and things that will help you get the job done. And the third part helps you determine the best way to reach out to the people who will help you to accomplish your goals.

  It's a bare-bones, straightforward worksheet, but it has been extraordinarily helpful to me, my sales staff, and many of my friends.

  In the first section, I list what I'd like to accomplish three years from today. I then work backward in both one-year and threemonth increments to develop midand short-term goals that will help me reach my mission. Under each time frame, I create an "A" and a "B" goal that will meaningfully contribute to where I want to be three years from now.

  A close friend, Jamie, offers a good example of how this works. Jamie was struggling to find direction in her life. She had graduated with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, thinking she'd become a professor. But she found academia too stuffy. She gave business a shot, but found the world of commerce unrewarding. So Jamie spent several months living in Manhattan thinking about where she was going in life, until it occurred to her that what she really wanted to do was teach children.

  I asked Jamie to give my Networking Action Plan a try. She was skeptical at first. "That may be good for MBA types, but I'm not sure it works for people like me," she insisted. Nonetheless, she agreed to try it.

  So she set about filling out the worksheet. Her "A" goal three years forward was to be a teacher. Her three-year "B" goal was to be a teacher in a well-respected district located in a place she wanted to live. Then she filled in his short-term A and B goals.

  In ninety days, she wanted to be well on her way toward becoming certified as a high school teacher, enrolling in some type of program that would help professionals transition into the field of education. In a year, she wanted to be teaching full-time; she made a list of some of the best high schools in Manhattan that she might enjoy working at.

  In the second part of the Plan, broken up in similar time increments, she had to name one or two people for each A and B goal who she thought could get her one step closer to making her goal a reality.

  Jamie did her research and found the contact for a program that places midcareer professionals into teaching positions. She also found out the names of the people at each of the best high schools she had listed who were responsible for hiring. Finally, she found the number for an organization that provides teaching certification courses.

  Within a couple of weeks, Jamie was on her way. She started to see the symbiotic relationship between goal setting and reaching out to the people who can help us achieve those goals. The more she accomplished, the bigger her teaching network grew. The bigger her teaching network grew, the closer she came to accomplishing her three-year goals.

  Ultimately, the third stage helps you assess which of the strategies I'll show you in the following chapters will be most successful. With some people, it will require you cold-call them (which we'll talk more about later). Others you'll be able to reach through friends of friends; still others might best be acquainted through a dinner party or conference. I'll teach you how to utilize all these methods and more.

  Jamie is now a tenured high school history teacher in one of the best high schools in the country, in Beverly Hills, California. And she loves the job.

  This process can be used by almost anyone, whatever your career. After completing the worksheet, you'll have a mission.

  You'll have the name of a flesh-and-blood person who can help you take the next step in achieving that mission. And you'll have one, or perhaps several, ways to reach out to that person.

  The purpose of this exercise is to show that there is a process, a system if you will, involved in building a network. It's not magical; it's not reserved for a select few born with an inherent gift for being social. Connecting with others really just involves having a predetermined plan and carrying it out, whether you want to be a ninth-grade history teacher or start your own business.

  Moreover, you can apply the
worksheet to every aspect of your life: to expand your network of friends, further your education, find a lifelong partner, and search for spiritual guidance.

  Once you have your plan, post it in a place (or places) where you will see it on a regular basis. Share your goals with others. This is very powerful and perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of having clear goals—there are hidden opportunities waiting to be accessed in everyone if you just tell them what you want.

  Fill this sheet out now, before going on to the next chapter. I like to keep some variation of it in my Palm to remind myself regularly what I need to be accomplishing, and whom I need to reach out to. A few years ago, I laminated a small version of the sheet and kept it in my wallet.

  But your goals must be in writing. Have the conviction to put your intentions to paper. An unwritten wish is just a dream. In writing, it's a commitment, a goal.

  Here are a few other criteria to consider when filling out your

  Networking Action Plan, or NAP:

  • Your goals must be specific. Vague, sweeping goals are too broad to be acted upon. They must be concrete and detailed. Know what steps you'll take to achieve your goal, the date by which it will be accomplished, and the measurement you'll use to gauge whether you've achieved the goal or not. I tell my salespeople that setting a goal like "I'm going to have my best quarter ever" is not enough. Will they make $100,000 or $500,000?

  • Your goals must be believable. If you don't believe you can reach them, you won't. If your goal is to increase the revenues of your business to five million dollars in a year, and you only achieve revenues of one million, you're setting yourself up for failure. Instead, set your goal at half a million dollars for the year—and beat the heck out of it.

  • Your goals must be challenging and demanding. Step out of your comfort zone; set goals that require risk and uncertainty. And when you achieve your goal, set another one. One of the best salesmen I've ever met is a man my father knew named Lyle, who sold books door-to-door. He would set annual sales goals for himself, write them down, and place them wherever he could: in his wallet, on his refrigerator, in his desk. Inevitably, he'd reach his goal months ahead of schedule. Then he'd simply write down another one. The man was never satisfied. What matters is the goal setting, Lyle would say, not the goal getting. He may have been the only door-to-door book salesman in Pennsylvania—or anywhere else, for that matter—who died a rich man.